In a subterranean space at 180 Studios in London, it feels as if the reports of cinema’s death are greatly exaggerated. Hardly a month since the immersive video-art exhibition Paradigm Shift vacated the building, a small, sloping projection space has been converted into an intimate, cosy and very much alive screening room. The attraction? BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, the debut feature film by longtime 180 collaborator Kahlil Joseph.
Curator Sean Bidder conceived the space in collaboration with film distributor Rich Spirit and adapted it with Joseph’s work in mind, as a place for celebrating artist commissions and limited-release film. Called, simply, the Underground Cinema, it will run BLKNWS through 27 March, then readapt.
The film is itself an adaptation, expanded from Joseph’s eponymous video piece from 2019, which was co-commissioned by 180 Studios. Installed at that year’s Venice Biennale, it imagined a TV news network through the filter of the Black experience, narrated by a fast-talking, politically engaged ‘host’ and spliced with archival newsreels, images, performances and other moments in Black history, like a video collage. The filmmaker called it a ‘fugitive newscast’ exploring Black identity and reclaiming cinema ‘as a crucial act of intervention, critique, even mischief’.
At the time critics posited that the conceit of a media network dominated by black editorial would make a viable, nay powerful business model. ‘BLKNWS shouldn’t be art. It should be real,’ wrote Andrew Goldstein in Artnet.
The 113-minute version is realer, overlapping fantasy and history with inspiration from civil-rights activists WEB Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, and the Underground Museum of the late artist Noah Davis. Joseph enlisted Black scholars, poets and thinkers from the diaspora to collaborate on the script, to funnel their own experiences into a layered, textural inventory of Black life going back 247 years. Writers credited include Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Dionne Brand and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. They’ve compared the film with a mixtape and the experience of watching with an immersive musical happening.
‘BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is a film conceived with the fluidity and creativity of an album,’ Joseph said in the run-up to his 180 residency. ‘This approach allowed me to think beyond traditional boundaries, embracing a process that seamlessly incorporates the contributions of other directors, artists and collaborators.’
During the run of BLKNWS, the original two-channel video installation will run in an anteroom, as an aperitif or palate-cleanser for ticket-holders.
